I am a big Dr. Seuss fan, so it comes as no surprise that my favourite Christmas book is “How the Grinch stole Christmas”. Even though I can’t quite see how the Grinch so quickly sees the error of his ways, I suppose for a children’s book it is necessary to keep it simple.

To get into the Christmas spirit Seussville offers various activities. You will find an online coloring game for your kids where they can color in various Grinch-related images. It’s fun!

There are a lot of other projects, like making your own Grinch mask, making a door knob, games and more to pass the time until Christmas.

And if you can’t get enough of the Grinch, check out the Grinch ornaments on Wizzley.

I love all those rainbow of books pictures that are floating around on the internet. So I decided to create our own little rainbow with the boys’ books. Isn’t that kind of neat?

What do your kids’ shelves look like?

Here are my finds for this week…

• An interesting article from the Harper Perennial blog about recommended book blogging practices
• Birgit at The Book Garden is having a giveaway for the German and Austrian readers of her blog. Head on over to check it out!
  Birgit von The Book Garden verschenkt ein paar Bücher an eine/n ihrer deutschen oder österreichischen Leser/innen. Liebe Zeit, es gibt nicht mal ein ordentliches deutsches Wort für “giveaway”. Das gibt’s doch gar nicht!
• You want to know the difference between nerds and geeks? You will find the answer at Businessinsider.
• A good article about “The children’s authors who broke the rules” on the Ney York Times website. They are Maurice Sendak, Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss.
• If you are a fan of The Cure then you want to read this interview with Robert Smith at The Guardian.
• Steampunk C3P0 and R2D2, storm troopers and other cool robots can be found on the flickr page of Space Boy Robot.

Another new feature on my blog…. I usually display interesting posts and articles and such (at least interesting to me) in my sidebar under “What others are talking about”. In order to give them a bit more exposure I decided to list them in a weekly post called “week on the web”. Here we go…

• Judith created a very funny guest post quiz about “What kind of holiday reader are you?” over on Birgit’s blog “The Book Garden”
• Christopher Walken re-tells  “The three little pigs”
• The 20 most iconic book covers ever at Flavorwire
• Amigurumi a little different, very cute nevertheless. Want to see Buffy stake Spike? Head on over to Pop Culture Crochet!
• A VERY nice Steampunk house (not the Steampunk loft in NY that is for sale for almost 2 Mio. dollars).
• Want to have a look at some seriously ugly lamps? Go to the better after blog and take a look at the “Ugly Lamp Competition”. You will see things nightmares are made of. All I say is “creepy baby”.

No problem! Just go to Lucy Knisley’s Live Journal and have a look at the Summharry. Eight illustrated posters that sum up the whole story of all Harry Potter books in a parody comic.

For a limited time Lucy even offers free downloads of the high resolution files so you can print them out and put up on your walls.

HP fans should have a look!

My kids like crafting. So I booked my older son for a few craft workshops during the holidays to keep him occupied for a few hours.

One of them was a Deco patch class and I thought he’d come home with this enormous sculpture covered by patterned paper, instead he came home with a super cute collage. I love the little lizard with the various papers on him. And can you see the horizon lines?

Some time ago a friend gave me the German book “Die kleinen Leute von Swabedoo”, a fairy tale by an unknown author. It is a wonderful story about loving, giving and what happens when you stop doing that. I looked around on the net whether there was an English version out there and it seems there are different versions of the story.

In general the story seems to be called “Warm fuzzies”, because warm fuzzies are the gifts that people exchange in the story (in German they are giving “small, warm fur”, something the reader can actually feel because one “small, warm fur” is attached to the cover of the book). There is one version on amazon called The Original Warm Fuzzy Tale. Obviously it is rather close to the German version as far as the story goes. Then there is one by a Richard Lessor which must be actually quite modern as TV and restaurant chains are mentioned. It is much shorter than mine and not nearly as detailed (maybe the free text on the internet is abridged, I don’t know).

One of the reviewers on amazon complains about people dying in the “original” story. That is something she doesn’t “want to read to her children”. I wonder why. In every fairy tale (just like in real life) gruesome things happen and a lot of people die. Why wouldn’t she want to read that to her kids? I wanted to recommend to her the book The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim. Maybe that would open her eyes.

All that aside, if you have kids and want to teach them something about the importance of happiness, giving and love, then this very short book is not a bad choice at all.

To all the parents out there who have tried to get a kid to sleep… Hilarious and so true. If you prefer to read the book by Adam Mansbach, you can have a look here:  Go the F**k to Sleep

For the Germanophiles: You can also listen to Werner Herzog read the book at the launch at the NY Public Library.  

In the US it is National Children’s Book Week. You can find out everything about the event at the Children’s Book Week site.

There you will also find various ideas for how to celebrate during the week, you will find a downloadable book mark and lots of interesting links to events and other websites.

Time to list a few of my favourite children’s books:

• Where the wild things are
  Unfortunately my kids are not too keen on it.
• The Lorax
  Every kid show know the Lorax.
• The Wizard, the Ugly, and the Book of Shame
  Wonderful artwork
• Tyrannosaurus Drip
  The cutest story of a herbivore dino’s egg ending up in the T-Rex’ nest
• The Gruffalo
  Who doesn’t love the Gruffalo?

 

You can find a more extensive list  in a previous Thursday 13 post about favourite children’s books.

What are YOUR favourite children’s books?

Like I said before already, today is Earth Day and it is appropriate to take “The Lorax ” as today’s

book. To read a bit more about “The Lorax” please go to my previous post titled “The Lorax Project”.

The book is, of course, written in the typical manner of Dr. Seuss. Here we go:

 

At the far end of town

where the Grickle-grass grows

and the wind smells slow-and-sour when it blows

and no birds ever sing excepting old crows…

is the Street of the Lifted Lorax.

  

I am getting a feeling that the end is near already…